Sunday, July 16, 2006

Fire it Up

I love writing prompts. They're writer mind kindling, always starting something with that built-in "what if." The right prompt will jumpstart an idea out of nowhere, and there really are no limits to how far you can take one.

Case in point: long ago, when dinosaurs still roamed the earth, a friend asked me, "If you could be anyone, in any time period, and do anything, what would you do?"

It probably is the oldest writing prompt in the world, but I got a lot of mileage out of it. I started by writing a personal parody/short story about an ER doctor in the future who is forced at gunpoint to deliver a killer alien's vicious quintuplets, which became my short story Border FreeClinic. That story evolved into StarDoc, which became my first published SF novel. StarDoc evolved into a SF novel series of six books and counting, two spin-off parallel novels, and a same-universe standalone. And I'm not done yet.

The brain child of the twisted minds at Fresh Boiled Peanuts, the book is packed with great starters, ideas on how to use them, and a fun, user-friendly format. It's also not genre-specific or targeted, so it will appeal to any type of fiction writer.

Three sample prompts from the book:

You come home from a business trip and realize you have the wrong suitcase.

A man opens his mailbox to find an envelope containing a set of instructions.

"Whatever you do, don't turn on the light. Please."

My only complaint is that at $19.99 US/$27.99 Canadian/£12.99 UK the book is a bit pricey, especially for writers on a tight budget. I recommend you find a copy at your local bookstore, if possible, and have a look first. You'll get a better idea of the contents and if you think they're worth that much to you.

Or you can take a shot at getting a free copy of the book right now: in comments to this post, give us a writing prompt* by midnight EST on Monday, July 17, 2006. I'll draw three names from everyone who participates and send the winners a copy of The Writer's Book of Matches. Giveaway open to everyone on the planet, even if you've won something here at PBW in the past.

*Your prompt can be a random line of dialogue, a situation, or anything else that you think up, or a great prompt you've found elsewhere.

I loved this one. I got a lot out of it for one of my short stories, in which the main character grew up and works in the family's exotic petshop--and it's a scifi. Her hands are so bitten, scratched, and overall scarred it's like a story in itself.

A pink unicorn pops into existence in your bedroom. A poorly-painted yard gnome is strapped to its back. The unicorn looks about for a moment and then mutters with a cockney accent, "Oh bother, not again."

When I was in school, for English composition we used to be given one-word titles and asked to write an essay on that topic (fiction or non-fiction). To this day, I still use that method to give my creativity a jolt. I wrote one on "Superstition" and another, my favourite, "Music".

Lewis and Clark went on their expedition fully expecting to find woolly mammoths, and in fact one of the Native Americans they encountered insisted his father had killed one two years ago and they were still eating the jerky.

You enter your garage, sit in your car and discover a set of keys in the ignition.Not only are they someone else's keys, you realise the car isn't yours. Same model, same colour, someone else's junk in the dash.Take it away ...

It's 7.30pm. You've had a bad day at work. You put your keys in your front door and they don't fit. You look up and it isn't your door. It isn't even your house. Its where your house should be, but it isn't yours.

I read once that Ray Bradbury started off by writing down a bunch of titles that interested him and, over the years, coming up with stories to match. (The title Dandelion Wine, surely, must have come first.) Here are some titles (along with a plot prompt to get started with):

Cover the Streets in Darkness (Mysterious clouds roll in and bizarre things start happening in the ensuing shadows)Whence Came the Leprechaun (Something odd about that midget in Timmy's fourth grade class)Wet Shoelaces (One man begins to suspect a supernatural plot against him when each time he steps out of a car, it's into a puddle)Further Down the Road (Cross-country road trip turns frantic when all highway billboards point to locations that always end up being 10 more miles away)Time Merchants (What if you could buy more time in the day to get more things done? What price would you pay?)Millicent Steven's Fantastic Pet (Her neighbors can't seem to figure out what kind of animal it is, but since she got it, Millicent's garden has never looked so good. And has her house gotten taller?)

My best one is very simple: Right now, what is the worst thing that could happen to you? 'You' being either me (and sometimes my honest answers are unexpected), or a proto-character in my head. I think this is one PBW uses as well.

The second: You are in the bath, working shampoo into your hair, when a small shark rises between your knees and sheepishly asks for directions to the Pacific Ocean. What next? It helps me to come up with ridiculous scenarios, breaking the deadlock if I've gotten to close to something and can't see wood for trees.

Larissa, that's not the opening for the autobiography of the last year of your life, is it?

Simon, now you're writing about MY life. Fortunately, we got the snake out before I actually was in the state to sleep on my side of the bed, but knowing he'd been there didn't make it easy to sleep there.

"What the hell was that?" is one of my favorites. Another is to pick my favorite character in the story and kill him or her. But the all-time best writing prompt came from my boss when I was a copywriter. Picture a guy who looks like Porky Pig, in a grey suit with a head of very curly hair. He'd say, "You wanna keep eating? Write it. I'm going to the can."

Midnight. The exact time when one day switches to the next. I'm writing this at 12:38am on Monday the seventeenth. Does this mean I'm too late? What if I'm too late? What repurcussions will this have on my writing career (flegling as it is)? If I'm still responding in time and don't win, does this mean that I'm the typical random drawing loser or does this mean that PBW doesn't think enough of my response to include me in the drawing? Perhaps she's sending out a crack team of assassins to interrupt my ramblings. If you don't see a response by me in the next thirty days, it might be safer to assume the latter than any of the former. God save my soul. *~)

The urge to rifle through a stranger's belongings shouldn't have been that difficult to resist. But it was. The suitcase sat there on the edge of the motel bed, taunting me, practically begging me to open it up and peruse the life of a random stranger.

---

I've found and to be idea gold mines. Sometimes just a character description or a name will spark a story idea.

"The unexpected return of a person who displays unusual character attributes or abilities never seen before.

-or-

A wish comes true but not in the way the wisher expected or wanted, and there's no cancelation clause."

These are the prompts from Day 1 of the 7-in-7 contest, held annually in the CompuServe SF Lit forum. The idea is to write seven short stories in seven days, using (if you want) the prompts posted each day.

You are hiking to the top of a mountain, over an hour from the parking lot. A man is running back down the trail and yells, "Did you meet anyone? Somebody stole my backpack and it has my car keys in it!"

This actually happened. I've often wondered what the rest of the story was, in actual fact...